Sunday, June 05, 2016 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time 1st Reading: 1k 17:17-24 2nd Reading: Gal 1:11-19 Gospel: Luke 7:11-17
Jesus went to a town called Naim and many of his disciples went with him – a great number of people. As he reached the gate of the town, a dead man was being carried out. He was the only son of his mother and she was a widow; there followed a large crowd of townspeople.
On seeing her, the Lord had pity on her, and said: “Don’t cry.” Then he came up and touched the stretcher and the men who carried it stopped. Jesus then said, “Young man, awake, I tell you.” And the dead man got up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. A holy fear came over them all and they praised God saying, “A great prophet has appeared among us; God has visited his people.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the
Assimilated Life
Experience)
While lining up at the Lourdes Grotto in France in 2005, I saw a dying man lying on a mobile bed at the start of the line. Like the dead man in today’s Gospel, the man was also young. Both had to be carried: the man of Naim in a coffin; the man in Lourdes on a mobile bed. In both scenes their respective mothers were there. But while the man of Naim was carried to burial grounds, the man in Lourdes was brought to healing waters.
I was hoping the man from Naim would come out from bath a cured man. Wasn’t it unfair for a dying man traveling to Lourdes from another European country on a cold month for nothing? The water was even cold enough to kill him. Something inside me kept protesting. But seeing the glowing eyes of the mother while accompanying her son out of the bath, I realized it was I who had lost hope. “Hope”, wrote Emily Dickinson, “is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all”. Without saying a word the mother wheeled her son back to the grotto to thank the Blessed Virgin.
“Life is under no obligation to give us what we expect”, wrote Margaret Mitchell. Neither is God under such obligation, and the mother understood this. She was happy enough that her son was given the chance to dip in the miraculous bath ahead of the others. The Bible says that hope is one of the three things that remain in the end (the other two is faith and charity). Had she come out of that bath hopeless, she would have been left with nothing in life.
Someone tapped my shoulder. It was my turn. “His sickness could be contagious”, my inner self was protesting. I was not only losing hope but also faith, and something was wrong with my charity. I was the sick man, not that bed-ridden guy; I was the real dead, not the man from Naim!– (Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM. Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com.
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